Does AI actually help students learn? A recent experiment in a high school provides a cautionary tale.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.
A third group of students had access to a revised version of ChatGPT that functioned more like a tutor. This chatbot was programmed to provide hints without directly divulging the answer. The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127 percent more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better. Students who just did their practice problems the old fashioned way — on their own — matched their test scores.
If you’d have read tye article, you would have learned that there were three groups, one with no gpt, one where they just had gpt access, and another gpt that would only give hints and clues to the answer, but wouldn’t directly give it.
That third group tied the first group in test scores. The issue was that chat gpt is dumb and was often giving incorrect instructions on how to solve the answer, or came up with the wrong answer. I’m sure if gpt were capable of not giving the answer away and actually correctly giving instructions on how to solve each problem, that group would have beaten the no gpt group, easily.